Poetry | What Purpose…Everything?

What Purpose…Everything?

© 2018 Vernon Miles Kerr

What purpose would everything serve

An eternal, omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent

Creator?

What purpose would anything, temporary?

But all is temporary:

From the far-flung Galaxies

To our grinding continental plates,

To the squalling infant at birth.

All, temporary;

All, here-today; gone-tomorrow.

When the sun has grown to scorch the Earth

To a crisp cinder,

What will remain?

A memory?

Whose memory?

The Creator’s memory?

To what purpose?

What purpose, human life?

The infant’s violent, bloody, painful launch;

The hunger, fatigue—the desires,

Both fulfilled and not.

The friends and family expired,

Once urging, cajoling, entreating, kidding,

Gone.

Only a memory; or set of same.

Amorphous memories,

Changing, unreliable memories.

The “great” men and women,

Just memories in ink and stone,

But still, memories alone,

Which memories, when our own lives end,

Are also

Gone.

To one, truly eternal,

It would all have to be pure tedium:

A continual flashing, coalescing, exploding,

Consolidating, disintegrating,

Bore.

A video-game that has been won;

No longer a challenge; devoid of surprise.

But if such a one could infuse

Us, pitiful, fleeting blobs of protoplasm

With a retrievable pinch of his own eternity,

A pinch of permanence on loan—

Then experience would be eternal,

Memories cast in a substance, truly of substance

And eternal-stone.